Local author depicts southern Alberta basketball through pictures

By Lethbridge Herald on October 15, 2024.

SCREENSHOT photo A screen shot of some of Ken HamiltonÕs Southern Alberta Basketball Ð A History in Pictures books.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

Local author Ken Hamilton has published a nine-book series to depict basketball history in the region through  Southern Alberta Basketball – A History in Pictures.

Hamilton refereed high school and post-secondary basketball for 26 years and evaluated college officials for another four years.

It was in February 2023, when he attended a college men’s game and that the men’s coach’s wife had heard that Hamilton had wrote a book previously which she thought was about basketball.

Hamilton had clarified it wasn’t  and she had suggested that he write one about refereeing.

“I said yeah but nobody (would) read a referees book,” said Hamilton.

“So I thought that was the end of it. But (in) walking my dog the next couple of days, I just realized that southern Alberta’s got such rich history in basketball and I’ve never seen anything done about it, like no compilations or anything. So I thought I could do that.”

The first three books talk about basketball in Raymond, Cardston and Magrath through their local teams at the high school level, the senior church ball teams and community teams.

LCI, Catholic Central and Winston Churchill are also included in the series, while Chinook was included in the back of the LCI book.

The University  of Lethbridge and Lethbridge  College (now Polytechnic) have their own books in the series.

“Those schools were tough because (there were) a lot of years they didn’t even take team pictures,” said Hamilton.

“I thought I was going to have to do the two of them in one book but (the) more I searched and the help I got, we got enough pictures to do a book each.”

The ninth book is called  the Forgotten Schools.

“I found about 38 high school and post-secondary programs in southern Alberta that no longer exist,” said Hamilton.

 Agricultural colleges in Raymond and Claresholm and officiating related topics are included in that book.

His favourite moments in the books is when senior men’s Basketball is talked about with Raymond Union Jacks of the early 1920s, the Broders teams of the late 1950 and early 1960s  and their success of winning championships and how the Lethbridge Nationals made a name for themselves to name a few.

Something that fascinated Hamilton was finding out about families and even his own that he didn’t know that coached and played.

“It’s kind of a family discovery thing,” he said.

The picture books are between 320 and 500 pages.

“We’ve been able to put them all together to make it easy for people to look back at the whole history of their school or their town,” said Hamilton.

Immanuel Christian will be included in the next series.

The books will be launched at a Celebration of Southern Alberta Basketball event on Thursday night at the VisitLethbridge.com Arena’s Canadian Western Bank Lounge beginning at 7 p.m.

The books will be available for purchase and are available on Amazon.

The event will also highlight local Team Canada members successes and the upcoming Western Slam NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball tournament that is coming to Lethbridge next month.

The celebration is free to attend.